The challenges posed to record labels by Napster in the late 1990s and early 2000s resemble those posed by Sci-Hub to scholarly publishers today. But which of those resemblances are real, and which are misleading?

“If you do not have subscription access to academic journals through an institution then to access a large proportion of academic journals you will be charged a fee for each paper; fees of $30 or more per article are common. And if you need to access a lot of papers then the cost quickly adds up. Needless to say many people don’t have the means to pay. Of course you could stick to open access journals i.e. free to read and download (Head to the directory of Open Access Journals for easy access to a whole range of open access journals), but by doing so you will miss a lot of what’s happening in the academic world*. If you can’t afford to pay then you have a few options to get around the paywalls.”

Following a recent ruling by a district court in Virginia in favor of the American Chemical Society (ACS), several domains of the controversial pirate website, Sci-Hub, have become inactive. In addition to slapping $4.8 million in damages, the ruling also stated that internet search engines and web-hosting services should refrain from providing access to such…read more

A U.S. district judge in Virginia awarded $4.8 million in damages to the American Chemical Society on Friday in a lawsuit filed against Sci-Hub, a website that allows users to access copyrighted scientific texts free of charge, circumventing publisher paywalls.

Ownership of intellectual property rights for a large proportion of the scholarly record is held by publishers, so a majority of journal articles are behind paywalls and unavailable to most people. As a result some readers are encouraged to use pirate websites such as Sci-Hub to access them, a practice that is alternately regarded as criminal and unethical or as a justified act of civil disobedience. This article considers both the efficacy and ethics of piracy, placing ‘guerrilla open access’ within a longer history of piracy and access to knowledge. By doing so, it is shown that piracy is an inevitable part of the intellectual landscape that can render the current intellectual property regime irrelevant. If we wish to actively construct a true scholarly commons, open access emerges as a contender for moving beyond proprietary forms of commodifying scholarly knowledge towards the creation of an open scholarly communication system that is fit for purpose.

I like the Impactstory oaDOI initiative, and the Unpaywall tool built on it. I like the idea that Clarivate data will now help users click through to much more OA content than before. I also like the fact that Clarivate is funding this initiative and not just supporting it with data. Congratulations to all….

Sci-Hub remains among the most common sites via which readers circumvent article paywalls and access scholarly literature. But where exactly are its download requests coming from? And just what is being downloaded? Bastian Greshake has analysed the full Sci-Hub corpus and its request data, and found that articles are being downloaded from all over the world, more recently published papers are among the most requested, and there is a marked overrepresentation of requested articles from journals publishing on chemistry.

Abstract

Despite the growth of Open Access, potentially illegally circumventing paywalls to access scholarly publications is becoming a more mainstream phenomenon. The web service Sci-Hub is amongst the biggest facilitators of this, offering free access to around 62 million publications. So far it is not well studied how and why its users are accessing publications through Sci-Hub. By utilizing the recently released corpus of Sci-Hub and comparing it to the data of ~28 million downloads done through the service, this study tries to address some of these questions. The comparative analysis shows that both the usage and complete corpus is largely made up of recently published articles, with users disproportionately favoring newer articles and 35% of downloaded articles being published after 2013. These results hint that embargo periods before publications become Open Access are frequently circumnavigated using Guerilla Open Access approaches like Sci-Hub. On a journal level, the downloads show a bias towards some scholarly disciplines, especially Chemistry, suggesting increased barriers to access for these. Comparing the use and corpus on a publisher level, it becomes clear that only 11% of publishers are highly requested in comparison to the baseline frequency, while 45% of all publishers are significantly less accessed than expected. Despite this, the oligopoly of publishers is even more remarkable on the level of content consumption, with 80% of all downloads being published through only 9 publishers. All of this suggests that Sci-Hub is used by different populations and for a number of different reasons, and that there is still a lack of access to the published scientific record. A further analysis of these openly available data resources will undoubtedly be valuable for the investigation of academic publishing.

Figure 1. Top: Number of Publications in Sci-Hub by year of publication.

Figure 2. Top: The 20 most frequent journals in all of Sci-Hub.

Figure 3. The most downloaded publishers that are either overrepresented (top) or underrepresented (bottom).

Analysis of scholarly publishing’s ‘Napster’ shows that academics are not prepared to wait to access research

“Described as the “Napster” of scholarly publishing, the popularity of the Sci-Hub website reflects researchers’ frustration with the inaccessibility of journal papers behind paywalls. Now, one of the first academic studies of the platform, which offers free use of millions of articles, suggests that publishers’ responses to the open access movement are proving ineffective, too. Bastian Greshake, doctoral student in applied bioinformatics at Goethe University Frankfurt, found that 35 per cent of articles downloaded from Sci-Hub were less than two years old when they were accessed.”

Nature writer Richard Van Noorden recently asked us for our thoughts about Sci-Hub, since in many ways it’s quite similar to our newest project, oaDOI. We love the idea of comparing the two, and thought he had (as usual) good questions. His recent piece on Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan quotes some of our responses to him; we’re sharing the rest below:

Like many OA advocates, we see lots to admire in Sci-Hub.

First, of course, Sci-Hub is making actual science available to actual people who otherwise couldn’t read it. Whatever else you can say about it, that is a Good Thing.

Second, Sci–Hub helps illustrate the power of universal OA. Imagine a world where when you wanted to read science, you just…did? Sci-Hub gives us a glimpse of what that will look like, when universal, legal OA becomes a reality. And that glimpse is powerful, a picture that’s worth a thousand words.

Finally, we suspect and hope that Sci–Hub is currently filling toll-access publishers with roaring, existential panic. Because in many cases that’s the only thing that’s going to make them actually do the right thing and move to OA models.

All this said, Sci–Hub is not the future of scholarly communication, and I think you’d be hard pressed to find anyone who thinks it is. The future is universal open access.

And it’s not going to happen tomorrow. But it is going to happen. And we built oaDOI to be a step along that path. While we don’t have the same coverage as Sci–Hub, we are sustainable and built to grow, along with the growing percentage of articles that have open access versions. And as you point out, we offer a simple, straightforward way to get fulltext.

That interface was not exactly inspired by Sci–Hub, but rather I think an example of convergent evolution. The current workflow for getting scholarly articles is, in many cases, absolutely insane. Of course this is the legacy of a publishing system that is built on preventing people from reading scholarship, rather than helping them read it. It doesn’t have to be this hard. Our goal at oaDOI is to make it less miserable to find and read science, and in that we’re quite similar to Sci–Hub. We just think we’re doing it in a way that’s more powerful and sustainable over the long term.

Money is known technically as “fungible” — that is, it can be exchanged for nearly anything. For instance, a few hundred years ago, prostitutes could exchange money for indulgences, essentially using sex to buy salvation. A criminal can use money gained by theft to pay for food for his or her child.

Not all transfers are this extreme, but as human inventions go, money is one of the most remarkable. As Yuval Noah Harari writes in his excellent book, “Sapiens”:

For thousands of years, philosophers, thinkers, and prophets have besmirched money and called it the root of all evil. Be that as it may, money is also the apogee of human tolerance. Money is more open-minded than language, state laws, cultural codes, religious beliefs, and social habits. Money is the only trust system created by humans that can bridge almost any cultural gap, and that does not discriminate on the basis of religion, gender, race, age, or sexual orientation. Thanks to money, even people who don’t know each other and don’t trust each other can nevertheless cooperate effectively.

Debt is one expression of money. In recent times, debt has been demonized as unhealthy and worrisome. And, like all things, at a certain intensity or level, this is so. But at a modest or manageable level, it can be beneficial. Because it’s money, debt aligns the interests of people who might otherwise not cooperate. With the musical “Hamilton” bringing the founder of the US banking system to the fore, it’s worth remembering that one of the major steps in unifying the states was to make every state and every citizen responsible for a common federal debt. Not only did this allow the US to borrow at a much higher level than any state or individual could have alone, leading to the rapid emergence of a viable nation, but it aligned the interests of the states in a way no pledge or oath could have.

Trust is the fundamental reason that slip of printed paper in your pocket has value. We believe it to be so, and it is. There is no other reason. Currently, ninety percent of money is intangible, existing only in computers. But more importantly, even in its tangible form, its value is created in the same way as computerized money — by agreement. If we all agree that a currency of a former Eurozone country has no value, it has no value.

This trust system is remarkable on many levels, but it also has a special two-step aspect to it — it’s not that you trust money, but you trust that the other person trusts money, which the other person also assumes, closing the trust loop.

Even events like the hacking of the SWIFT system supporting international banking do little to break this trust system. We distrust the computers and people using them — everything points to a social engineering exploit here — but not money. In fact, the millions stolen from the hack only reinforces the trust in money.

But Sci-Hub and its ilk break our trust in money. Suddenly, rather than a fluid economic system that pays for the work done in the past and for work upcoming, publishers, editors, and professionals supporting book and journal sales can no longer trust that other people will assume their work will be worth anything. While not a breach of trust in money per se, it is a breach of trust in value and a clear disdain for money. The Sci-Hub sympathizers don’t believe that an economic transaction — any economic transaction, even one that provides content for a few cents to users — is defensible when it comes to whatever content or websites they hack.

The damage to the trust system of basic economic value in academic and scholarly publishing may be the most pernicious aspect of the Sci-Hub flap. Again and again, the expenses publishers incur — billions of dollars per year — to manage peer-review, pay editors, pay staff, pay vendors, pay for digital platforms, pay to support archives, and so forth, are pointed at as somehow illegitimate or unworthy of support.

At the same time, Sci-Hub itself has had to raise money to support its stolen cache of content, because of course it has computer, systems, bandwidth, and staff costs.

As I’ve written before, Sci-Hub is a dead end. It makes no economic contribution, and has no economic future. But it represents a fundamental threat to a major human achievement — the ability through money to transform one thing into another. Sci-Hub represents the end of human alchemy. It represents economic death.

In our imaginings of the future, we often envision a world without money. Maybe that will come to pass somehow. But as long as we need to efficiently transform one thing into another through the exchange of common tokens of agreed upon but abstract value, and as long as we seek unity of economic purpose in a way that allows for personal diversity and choice, money in some form will be part of our culture. Those who try to undercut this reality are working against “the apogee of human tolerance.”